Are We Having Fun Yet, Part 2
There isn’t much that is certain about work today, except uncertainty. In June, when we posted the first part of Are we Having Fun Yet, the Covid situation had evolved from office shutdowns and work from home (if one could) to vaccine development and administration. By the late spring, some enterprises (such as Disneyworld, featured in Part I) were adapting their workplaces to respond to the health-related requirements for operating safely in a pandemic. Our hopes rose for a return to something resembling normal, as our world moved toward a reopening.
Employers still recovering from total on-site shutdowns a year earlier, began inching their way toward cautious, phased reopening. By summer, many had announced target dates for an early fall return to on-site work; no sooner than the memos had been sent out, however, than those messages were amended. New return-to-work timetables now frequently cite January 2022 as the updated back-in-the-office expectation.
The response to all of this from employees with whom we’ve spoken has ranged from disappointment (from those who were eager to get back to the office) to sighs of relief (from those less than positive about re-entry.) What we didn’t hear were whoops of glee over the extension of mandated work-from-home. In many ways, the false alarm stimulated by an aborted initial return to normal was a litmus test of employee attitudes toward this issue. The test revealed a diversity of viewpoints on how work should be approached and a pattern to employee attitudes emerged toward the criticality of work being performed on-site.
While our sample was far from statistically representative, one trend we did see was a consistent preference for in-office work from senior leaders and a preference for remote options from those lower in the hierarchy. SmarterWisdom believes there is valuable insight to be gained by further examination of employee attitudes about how work should be done in 2021 and beyond and of parsing “who feels how, and why” about issues of work product quality, employee motivation and satisfaction.
Why is this important? There are myriad reasons that understanding employee opinions overall and, in particular, considering the differences among them by position, profession, level and demographic, can be of enormous value to employers. Despite the legal, cultural and administrative pressures to deal with employees as a monolithic group, reality suggests that it might well be worthwhile for organizations to invest time and energy in understanding where different categories of employees stand on critical work-related issues.
For example, the war for talent (or even simply for breathing bodies) has never been greater. Across the country, jobs are going begging, and employers are feeling the pinch. We have gone well beyond Help Wanted posters in store windows; this summer, sandwich-boards on the lawns of businesses or hand-lettered signs on entry doors of restaurants and other enterprises stating “closed early due to lack of staff” have proliferated. Some formerly full-time enterprises have become part time entities, open, for example, from Wednesday through Sunday only. Some operations have been forced to close permanently due to the dearth of personnel.
The effect of this situation is not insignificant. Businesses large and small feel the pressure of a labor shortage. From summer camps lacking counselors to seaside fish markets forced to close for whole days during their busiest season or airlines cancelling hundreds of flights because they lack the personnel to staff them, the lack of available labor is doing serious damage to profits and threatening the livelihoods of business owners and workers.
This is not only a problem for today; it sets our economy up for problems in the future. Businesses that are thriving and poised for future success are having their growth curtailed right now. An entrepreneur we coached to launch a successful new service business (which has earned an excellent reputation through six years of hard work and attention to detail and customer service) reported with dismay that she has had to turn away business because she had too few staff to take on additional customers. These sorts of missed opportunities are a loss to businesses today and to our economy in the years ahead.
There are ripple effects from this labor shortage, as well. A small business owner talked to us about a new challenge she is facing: Her employees were calling in at the last minute to report that they could not work that day. Their day care providers were operating with such skeletal staff numbers that they could not legally take all of the children they’d enrolled when one of their teachers suddenly called in sick.
Is this a problem of demographics? Do we simply have too many jobs and too few people? Or is something else at work here (please pardon the pun.) We don’t know the answers, but what we do know is that there is a serious need to find out. Because practically, this is an untenable, unhealthy situation. Our economy requires workers, and if workers aren’t available or don’t want to work, it is in serious trouble.
We are issuing a call to action: employers need to understand their own labor shortage. They need to know if they can do something about it. And if they can, they need to take those steps. The message is clear: any organization that wants to survive has to figure out how to win its war for talent.
Even pre-pandemic, long before emergency unemployment subsidies and extensions, employees were signaling clear dissatisfaction with their jobs. Record numbers of workers reported feeling unengaged in their work. That situation followed years of diminished union power, increased job uncertainty and ever-greater gaps between what senior executives earn and the paychecks of underlings. It is not difficult to see a pattern here: things have gotten worse for non-executive employees in our workforce in almost all ways.
There is an answer to this dilemma, and it does not require anyone to be a rocket scientist to discover it: Just as we effectively diminished the lot of workers, we can set about enhancing it. There are many reasonable actions employers can take which will improve things for workers: Pay them better. Provide them with an enhanced level of job security. Develop their skills so that they can continue to grow. Equitably disseminate the economic windfalls your organization experiences. Create working conditions and policies which support what workers identify as their most cherished values. Find out what those are. Ask for regular updates on how well your organization is doing by them. Give them feedback. Listen when they speak.
Improving the lot of employees is not going to make all labor market issues evaporate. But it is a step organizations can take to help them attract and, hopefully, retain the employees they need. Perhaps most importantly, it will lead to getting the best from their employees. And that will align the motivations of both organizations and their employees which will lead them both in the right direction for success.